I write about leadership, business, critical thinking, and their intersections.

It served as a way for me to crystallize thoughts and ideas and to share them with others.

My initial intention was to keep the topics mostly professional and related to business and critical thinking. In the meantime, I started a branded parallel blog over at EndGameLeadership.com. It basically duplicated the K.W. Wrede blog for a wider business audience. Continue reading →

Telecommuting isn’t a new topic. Under the right conditions there are many advantages for both employees and employers.

At both ends of the spectrum there are jobs that are impossible for telecommuting (i.e.: manufacturing) and there are jobs that are perfect (i.e.: some accounting tasks). We find the challenges in that grey blob in the middle. Those challenges can be our opportunities.

My good friend Rajesh Singh started a recent thread on LinkedIn asking about telecommuting.
(Read the full thread here.)

But, as I read the comments, I realized that as is often the case the question frames certain assumptions and we don’t think through the “real” problem. Continue reading →

Everyone agrees that innovation is the magical key to the future, a strategic activity that cannot be ignored.

A major topic of CEOs and MBA programs world-wide.

The biggest obstacle to innovation in any organization has absolutely nothing to do with innovation.

The biggest obstacle is that very few organizations create the strategic group culture needed to nurture innovation.

You may find a Senior VP for other “strategic” areas (think finance, marketing, operations, and even human resources), but you rarely have a SVP for innovation (or for that matter, leadership).
If the CEO does not take a personal hand in proactively promoting an environment for innovation, it just becomes an annoying buzz word that will be addressed “sometime in the future.”